Slavery is a major theme of historical studies, an awful but near ubiquitous institution, which contributed to our modern world but has been present across most of human history. Within substantial scholarly interest on the topic of slavery in ancient and medieval societies, we find that *slaving* presents a nearly unexplored theme-- slaving intends to refer to the various processes by which people were taken and transformed into commodities, and forcibly moved to places of enslavement (Miller 2012). By contrast to slavery in action, the wider concept of slaving has seen far less attention in scholarship on premodern history, and this gap has resulted in a narrow understanding of slavery’s societal impacts. By focusing on slaving, this conference hopes to expand knowledge of past slavery to encompass not only slave-owning societies themselves, but the communities from which slaves were taken, the agents who enslaved and moved them, and the routes and modes of their enslavement.

Program

APRIL 15

Jackman Humanities Building, 1st Floor Conference Room
4:00 – 6:00 Remarks followed by opening reception

APRIL 16

Lillian Massey Building, Room 220
Historical and Archaeological Approaches

9:00-9:30 Conference Introduction: Elizabeth Fentress, “How do we know they were slaves?”
9:30-10:00 Sarah C. Murray, “People as Property in Prehistoric Greece” 
10:00-10:30 Bettina Arnold and Manuel Fernandez-Götz, “Slavery in Iron Age temperate Europe”
10:30-10:45 Discussion
10:45 - 11:00 Coffee break
11:00-11:30 David Lewis, “Syria and the Hellenistic Slave Trade”
11:30-12:00 Adam Rabinowitz, “The elusive Black Sea slave in the Greek world: a portage around the historiographical rapids”
12:00-12:30 Seth Bernard, “Complexity Science and the Origins of Roman Slavery”
12:30-1:00 Discussion
1:00 – 2:30 Lunch
2:30-3:00 Christer Bruun, “New insights on slaving in the Roman Empire from Epigraphy”
3:00-3:30 Rebecca Redfern, “Bioarchaeological perspectives on captive taking and enslavement in the Roman empire”
3:30-3:45 Discussion
3:45-4:15 Eduardo Manzano, “To what extent were early Islamic societies based on slavery?”
4:15-4:45 Craig Perry, “Slaving, State Formation, and Political Economy in Northeast Africa and the Islamic Middle East”
4:45-5:30 Discussion

APRIL 17

Jackman Humanities Building, 1st Floor Conference Room
The Role of Archeogenetics

9:00-9:30 Ben Raffield, “Slavers from the North: The Dynamics of Raiding, Slaving, and Trading in the Viking World”
9:30-10:00 Hannah Moots, “Slavery in the Roman, Late Antique, and Medieval Mediterranean: Insights from Interdisciplinary Ancient DNA Research”
10:00-10:15 Discussion
10:15-10:45 Coffee break
10:45-11:15 Eugenia D’Atanasio, Ileana Micarelli, Beniamino Trombetta, "What ancient DNA can and cannot tell us about past mobility and slavery: examples from
Medieval Italy”
11:15-11:45 Samantha Cox, Margaret Andrews, Francesca Candillio, Elizabeth Fentress, and David Reich, “The genetic background of infant burials from
the slave barracks on the Imperial estate of Villa Magna (Italy)”
11:45-12:00 Discussion
12:00-12:30 Zuzanna Hofmanova, “Ancient DNA and Mobility in Early Medieval Europe: Implications for the Study of Slave Trading”
12:30-1:00 Michael McCormick, Response on Archaeogenetics and Ancient Slavery: “Thinking about the enslaved in a time of discovery”
1:00-1:15 Discussion
1:15-3:00 Lunch
3:00-5:30 Roundtable, Closing Discussion:

• Michael Dietler
• Kyle Harper
• Alice Rio
• Paul Lovejoy

PLease follow this link for registration.